Gallup: Chinese People See Themselves Struggling

With a roaring economy, gleaming new infrastructure and a rising profile on the world stage, one might assume China’s people are feeling pretty good about their lives these days.

Qilai Shen/European Pressphoto AgencyCommuters in a metro station in Shanghai…why so glum?

Not so, according to a new polling data from Gallup.

In results that seem to contradict a similar poll by the Pew Research Center, Gallup’s 2010 global wellbeing survey, issued this week, found only 12% of Chinese people thought of themselves as what Gallup calls “thriving,” while a whopping 71% said they were struggling and 17% said they were downright suffering.

Meanwhile, only 38% of people in the U.S. said they were struggling and a full 59% judged themselves to be thriving, according to Gallup.

Even given China’s struggles with runaway housing prices and rising food costs, it’s puzzling that nearly three quarters of Chinese people see themselves as struggling, particularly when the majority of people in the U.S., which spent all of last year flirting with double-digit unemployment, feel just fine.

The Gallup results are also surprising because they clash with Pew Research’s Global Attitudes survey, which finds Chinese people feeling significantly more optimistic about their lives.

Both the Pew and the Gallup polls measure life satisfaction by asking survey respondents to rank their lives on the Cantril Scale , or what Pew calls the “Ladder of Life” – a measure of present and future life quality ranging from zero to 10, with 10 representing the best possible life. In the Pew poll, 31% of Chinese people gave their present lives high marks (seven to 10) and 74% said they expected to live highly satisfying lives in the future. (Gallup combines present and future life ratings, with “thriving” roughly equivalent to a “high” score in Pew’s survey.)

It’s not entirely clear why the polls offer such different pictures of China. Pew surveyed more than three times as many Chinese people as Gallup, so sample size could be a factor. Scope might also come into play, with Pew talking disproportionately to urban residents, who are generally wealthier than people in the countryside.

Interestingly, according to the Gallup study, China is not the only fast-growing economy with a pessimistic population: Only 17% of Indians and 16% of Vietnamese people placed themselves in the upper echelons of life satisfaction–both below the global median of 21%.

Indeed, people in Asia as a whole scored slightly below the global thriving median, while residents of both Europe (25%) and the Americas (42%) scored well above it.

Accounting for the regional optimism gap may be as simple as looking at per capita GDP. In an analysis of Gallup’s 2006 global well being survey, Princeton economist Angus Deaton discovered an almost direct correlation between life satisfaction and GDP per head–people in wealthier countries were generally happier–while finding that economic growth actually had a negative effect on people’s sense of their own well-being.

Other economists have tried to account for economic growth’s negative relationship with life satisfaction–known as the Easterlin Paradox – by theorizing that a person’s sense of well being is determined by relative, rather than absolute, income. The idea is controversial in economic circles, but it might shed light on low levels of optimism in China, where a growing wealth gap has stoked increasing social tension.

While Gallup doesn’t touch on the subject, culture offers another explanation for Chinese pessimism. Unlike the U.S., driven since at least the 19th century by the sunny notion of Manifest Destiny, China, with its long history of boom and bust, has tended to value humility and a relatively strict management of expectations.

Evidence of this attitude is visible in the Communist Party’s insistence, even as it presides over a record-breaking pursuit of prosperity, that its end goal is the establishment of a “moderately well-off society” .

Struggling, in other words, may be the adjective Chinese people prefer.